Well, I guess today’s strip provides some semblance of continuity to Morton Winkerbean’s uh… dream (I guess that’s what it is) of being a “rock star”, lining up with Thursday’s strip about drugs and groupies and whatnot. That does seem like an odd dream for a nursing home resident, even today as the stars of the rock ‘n roll era approach nursing home resident age. Still, it actually kinda makes sense that a wannabe rock star would name his son “Funky”.

This also lines up relatively well with the Mort we first met back in 2011, still not fully lucid and irritating the folks around him with bad dad jokes. Today’s Mort is less somber and churlish than the on we saw at Christmas five years back, but we’ve only ever seen him like that around Funky. Perhaps we can chalk that up to Mort simply not liking his son… another reason he might have named him “Funky”.

15 responses to “Old Tyme Rock ‘N Roll”

If he really wanted to do these jokes about Morton’s (odd) rock star fantasies why didn’t he just run with it? It couldn’t possibly have been any worse than those awful non-gags about senility and breathing issues, right? What, was he afraid that Morty’s insane rock and roll fantasies might be too much for his regular readers or the funny page itself? Or is he so talentless and/or lazy that he just couldn’t come up with four actual jokes about it? And how can these people be speaking DURING a performance?

What is the point of three separate panels of the rock concert? It’s not adding anything to the strip. Two separate panels would’ve been just fine, and it would’ve contrasted the two better. I’m also kind of shocked that Batiuk didn’t do his typical fake comic cover think and actually draw Mort and the rest of the band as rock stars. I think calling this “half-assed” is giving it way too much credit.

Morty’s weird rock star fantasies are OK in and of themselves, like I said above it’s too bad BatHack couldn’t manage to weave something halfway decent out of it instead of relying on those stupid downbeat “old folks” gags of his. It’s almost like he’s still capable of having a little fun with FW but never for more than one day in a row.

But yeah, it IS pretty weird how he’s fantasizing about a genre of music (rock and roll) that didn’t even exist until he was already in his twenties. Again, come on TomBat, expand upon it. Morty headbanging to some Slayer at Bedside Manor or tossing a fit because a baffled Funky won’t take him to see Iron Maiden in Cleveland…dare to live a little Tom. You can’t possibly (chortle) damage the quality or integrity of the strip, as there isn’t any.

Between Mort yearning to be a rock god and Batiuk thinking that it’s a good idea to call a pharmacy chain ‘Drug Lords’ so he can have Crankshaft gripe about the high cost of prescription medicine for him, it’s gotten to the point where they have to farm out mayhem to Ted Forth.

I shouln’t nit pick an arc that actually tells a coherent story, but Mort’s fascination with rock music is strange. We know that Funky’s in his early to mid- fifties . That should make Mort somewhere in the range of late seventies to mid- eighties. Why does he have a fascination for music that would be more appropriate for Funky to be into?

I hate myself for saying this, but I like today’s comic, there’s actually a little life and rebellion to it, and shows Morton is not as dead inside as Batty’s been making it appear in his terrible writing. Comic gods forgive me, but it’s the best one in these past months of pure crap we’ve been getting.

I do agree that the artwork is good, and I understand that the first two panels are throw away since there are some ebil editors that cut them to save space. But I just can’t see how/why Funky’s dad would be into hard rock.

This is just crap thrown against the wall, some stuck, and now all we have is a dirty wall that smells bad.

It’s decent enough, kinda boomer nostalgia with a fuzzy edge. TB tries for “wry” so often and fails that I kinda have to rouse myself out of a FW induced stupor to even recognize when he actually succeeds. What’s interesting to me is how it parallels today’s Doonesbury. More boomer humor. Although the latter has a brilliantly subtle and surreal quality, almost “meta”. TB couldn’t do meta if his own future self turned up in a time machine to give him a stack of Starbuck comics from 2116.

Doonesbury of course always nails it when Trudeau waists to tackle aging issues. TB simply goes for cheap shots that aren’t even funny. For the life of me I cannot see what is funny about Crankshaft and I curse the lot of you for making me aware of that soggy sack of soiled Depends.